Into Great Silence (Die Grosse Stille)
Your life is stressed out, overloaded, pinning into the red. Isn’t it? Mine is, and those are the average days. Places to be, e-mails to answer — an accelerating web of obligations. When did everything get so fast? Where did the time go? How do we step off?
Have I got a movie for you.
‘‘Into Great Silence’’ is a two-hour-and-40-minute documentary about monks, and it is one of the transporting film experiences of this or any other year. Some have described it as an endurance test, and, yes, if your idea of proper moviegoing is a prolonged spasm of jump-cuts and car chases, Philip Gröning’s very slow, very quiet film will be death with bells on.
But who said edging close to the divine is supposed to be easy? Renunciation is a challenge in movies as in life, but the clutter it removes can make other things visible. ‘‘Silence’’ finds beauty in subtraction and in slowing time down until God’s blueprint, however you define it, shows through. It’s filmmaking as meditation, and well worth the aching knees and abused sensibilities.
Gröning originally approached the Carthusian brotherhood in 1984, requesting permission to film in one of their monasteries. Sixteen years later, they got back to him; this counts as ASAP for a religious order established a millennium ago.
The director spent a year filming in the Grand Chartreuse, a 17th-century monastery high in the Alps outside Grenoble, France. He was there from winter to winter, and after a while you start to feel the earth turning through the seasons. There are no human voices at all for the first 20 minutes or so. The Carthusians are considered the most stringent of the Catholic sects: Aside from chanting the liturgy, a vow of silence applies while the brothers are on the grounds of the Chartreuse. They spend much of their waking hours cooped up in individual cells, contemplating God; meals served through slots in the doors make the jailhouse metaphor explicit.
Yet a more blissed-out group of men, young and old, you’ll be pressed to find. We see two novitiates welcomed into the order, passed joyfully from one monk’s embrace to the next. Later, the brothers walk through a nearby town and picnic in a field, chatting amiably about points of ritual and practice. When it snows, they head outside to skitch down hillsides in their boots, tumbling head over heels and laughing uproariously. These are men who have brought every ounce of their energy to becoming children again, playing in the light.
‘‘Into Great Silence’’ takes place at the spot where religious faiths converge on the inarticulate, and it has as much to say to a Zen Buddhist as to a Sufi Muslim as to a Kabbalist Jew as to a Carthusian. Gröning uses various filmmaking tactics to take us into the mystic: He switches between pristine HD video and grainy, hallucinatory Super-8; repeats key points of text until they become koans; undercranks his camera until the stars spin through the sky; films the monks in silent Warholian confrontation with his lens.
Sometimes the frippery works, but in general the film speaks more clearly the less it says. A simple shot of a brother in his cell, the sun slanting in from the left, is worthy of Vermeer; a nighttime image of the chapel focuses our attention on a distant red dot that may be a smoke detector but that is revealed, with some relief, to be a votive candle.
In the end, revelation is what ‘‘Into Great Silence’’ addresses on all its levels, from a wall of fog lifting to reveal the monastery crouched in snow to the discovery of divine grace in mending a pair of shoes.
Once or twice we glimpse an airplane high in the sky, people in a tin can hurtling from one place in the ‘‘real world’’ to another. Toward the end, an elderly brother smiles as he describes his God of well-being, this life where all is good, and you wonder if a monk’s isolation isn’t just naive and self-absorbed. There are no TVs here; maybe he hasn’t heard of Abu Ghraib or Rwanda. What would it do to his faith if he had?
On this, as on most matters, ‘‘Into Great Silence’’ stays mum. The film leads you into a vast and empty cathedral and asks only that you listen. What you hear is up to you.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
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